Political Quotes

“I come to the floor as we are moving forward, as many of my colleagues know, on this energy package. I thank my colleagues who have already come to the floor today to talk about it, and I especially thank Senator Murkowski for helping us to move through so many different proposals by our colleagues. We were able to clear some of these amendments by voice votes, and, hopefully, we will be able to move forward over the next 24 hours on this bill by getting some votes locked in. One of the things we are going to talk about this week is energy efficiency, which is creating jobs and making our economy more competitive by holding down the cost of energy. Many of us know that for centuries the use of energy has been a very important factor in our economy. Last week I mentioned that the Northwest economy was built on a hydrosystem. Cheap hydropower has worked for us over and over again, as companies that use a lot of electricity have moved to the Northwest. We have stored everything from apples to terabytes of data because of the huge efficiencies that we were able to pull off with cheap hydropower. As my colleague from Alaska will say, energy costs are high in Alaska and she wants to make sure we are making it more affordable and enabling distributed generation, as she just mentioned earlier today. Ensuring that we have a microgrid to do that is a key component to how the state will successfully diversify their economy.…”